Get There First, Decide Promptly

Richard Brown Baker (1912-2002) began collecting works by emerging artists in the 1940s, becoming one of the first collectors to actively embrace both Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art and eventually amassing more than 1,600 works from the postwar period. Represented among these are groundbreaking American artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Chuck Close, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Morris, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, and James Rosenquist, as well as European and Asian artists such as Alberto Burri, Jean Dubuffet, Georges Mathieu, Kurt Schwitters, and Jiro Yoshihara. Baker bequeathed the majority of his collection to the Yale University Art Gallery, and the balance to the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design.

Highlighting 130 works, this is the first complete history of Baker's important collection. Essays by renowned art historians Thomas Crow, Serge Guilbaut, Robert Storr, and others contextualize each of the five decades of Baker's collecting efforts, while entries on individual artists illustrate the remarkable scope of Baker's holdings. Throughout the publication, firsthand accounts from Baker's extensive personal journals describe his collecting activities within the dynamic New York art scene of the day.